


Blue on Black

by Nobodyhasblindedme



Series: Demonstuck [52]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Demon Hunters, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Canon-Typical Violence, Cults, Demonstuck, Guns, I do have an oc who is a major character in this, I hope they're well-written enough to not be cringy, M/M, Monsters, Multi, Other, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Rating May Change, Supernatural Elements, Swords, Weapons
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-18
Updated: 2019-06-18
Packaged: 2020-05-14 00:39:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19262458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nobodyhasblindedme/pseuds/Nobodyhasblindedme
Summary: Things aren’t exactly what you’d call ‘normal’ in the Strider household. Ever. But it’s got its routines and its own sense of mundanity.Then D gets a phone call.From pretty far-afield.





	Blue on Black

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Corvid_Knight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Corvid_Knight/gifts).



> Hello! I’ve been an avid reader of the Demonstuck series since perhaps it had less than half of the content for it that it does now, and I wanted to give a huge thanks to the wonderfully creative author of the series, and write my own little adventure for the hunter house to go on. This has been a project a couple months in the making so-far, and I hope anyone who reads it enjoys, and again, thank you for all your hard work and dedication to our favorite Homestuck boys.

"You know, at this point I think we can all agree the worst shit goes down in small towns in the middle of buttfuck nowhere. Can we all agree on that fact before we leave the van?" Hal asked.

No one disputed it.

 The scenery passed around them in a grey-white blur, occasionally cut through with the browns of trees or exposed mud in the middle of empty crop fields. Muted rust of barns on the distant horizon of those fields, or the spots of clear shapes of farmhouses similarly distant. The world was wrapped in white elsewise. According to the local weather reports though, it hadn't snowed in a week, leaving everything an off-greyish wash, slush on the roads and mounded in sickly piles as they steadily trekked towards their destination. Some quiet talk-radio had been playing for a while, when the team had collectively ousted Dirk and his playlist after five hours of hard bass and 'melodic drops.'

 "Well, there uh. Would probably be more opportunity for it out here? Pretty remote, places to hide," commented Gale.

 D nodded along, lifting a travel mug from its holder beside him to take a sip of lukewarm coffee. _’America Runs on Dunkin’ his left foot. It was Rose’s particular brew or nothin. Sorry sis, but your daughter works magic with them beans._ “Sounded pretty gruesome from the report. Hal isn’t incorrect.”

 “When smoking a bowl in the woods and like, tipping cows and shit gets boring people find ways to entertain themsleves, and it usually involves fucking around with ouija boards and Shit You Just Shouldn’t Fuck With,” Dave drawls from the farthest back row of seats, crammed between Karkat and Gale, one earbud out and fiddling with his phone. D was tempted to ask the demon to take it from him; the out-of-state fees for data would be bad enough, but it had been a while since Dave had to spend an elongated amount of time in a moving vehicle, since..yeah.

 Besides, a phone bills were the least of anyone’s problems currently.

 Someone whispered “Luigi board..”. Someone who was emphatically not John Egbert because saying a Meme while in a confined space with Hal, ostensibly for at least another half hour, was a very bad idea. The shikigami thankfully didn’t rise to the bait this time, however. He just adjusted himself in his seat, head turned back from looking out the window to stare off into space, the slightly glazed look a sign he was running internal systems, possibly recalling the multiple emails and the report itself from the household’s case files.

 “Eleven thirty at night on the fifth of March, the police station in the small nowhere town of Mailstrom, Canada, received a rather distressing call from one Rook Cervae, daughter of one William Cervae, that her father had been killed,” Hal begins. “She gave no more information then that, and when the cops showed up there were signs of a violent struggle...but no body. Plenty of blood...but no obvious weapon on the premises, and Rook herself having never seen or heard the perps in question by the time she discovered all this.”

 In the second Hal took - either for a moment to ‘breathe’ or more likely knowing the shikigami, for the slight dramatic pause - Gale frowned at the information and asked, “W-how? You just said she was the one who called. How did she not see or hear anything?”

 “No _obvious_ weapon?” Dirk question. He’d read the report as well, but there was still a good half an hour to go before the caravan of hunters reached their destination and Canadian talk-radio left a lot to be desired so picking apart the details of this hairbrained case D had picked up was all that was left.

 “I’m getting there,” Hal continued, with a small set to his eyebrows,“it gets weirder. So this guy, this William Cervae, he’s apparently involved - or, well, _used_ to be involved - in some of the local hunter groups. Like, something like Mr. Egbert. Everyone knows him, but he purportedly doesn't, well, _didn’t _do much-”__

 __  
_ _“Hey,” John said, mild offense coloring his pout.

 Hal holds up a hand, “He’s a fantastic archivist and has useful connections, but he’s not the man of action he was years ago, bro. He does make a red-velvet to kill for though. No one’s shadin’ Papa Egg,” the Strider concedes quickly.

 John’s eyebrows sink back down on his face where they had been in danger of crossing the path of a passing cloud and he quiets, rolls his eyes and sits back, mollified. Hal puts down his hand and cocks his head.

 “As for the fact his daughter supposedly never saw anything: she was apparently out for a walk that night, wasn’t home _to_ see or hear anything but the aftermath.”

 Hal’s eyes refocus briefly to glance to Dirk and answer his question, “The guy was a taxidermist on the side and a member of the local wildlife conservationist organization as well as an ex-hunter, so. There was enough sharp, poisonous, bullet-firing ‘phernalia in the house that literally any of it could have been used against him.”

 Gale’s expression quirks a little, and they ask “So no one else was around to see or hear any of this?”

 Hal blinks and looks pointedly out the window, the grey, looming trees and high hills, the few abandoned heaps of old mobile homes and unkempt fields of frozen untilled earth, and looks back to them.

 “Not exactly a metropolis with nosy neighbors out there, dude.”

 The human half-heartedly winces and sits back, turning to eye the surroundings with perhaps a bit more trepidation.

 “So then, if there was no body, do they think it was like...moved?” John adds.

 Hal takes a breath to reply, but it’s D who answers speaks this time.

 “That’s one of the reasons we’re even out here.”

 And so unfolds the entire situation.

 A number of very short days ago, the house was it’s usual level of calm. Which is to say the flying ass-rumpus of various passing faces, magic, technology and whatever else the Strider clan had picked up along it;s merry way through heaven and hell and every world in between.

 There existed a number of ways people both in the local town and Texas in general could get in touch with the Striders. Proxies via nomadic hunter groups and word-combo watchlists setup Hal could tap into or would send him pings for more dangerous stuff. A surprising amount of hits was crime perpetrated by humans against humans one would learn in the hunting business, for no small amount of reasons, in no small amount of gruesome ways. It was up to people like the Striders to figure out if the causes were truly something Other or not, and if it was, deal with it before it extended to beyond a few incidents coverup teams could string into less eye-catching tales for the general public and mourning families.

 Some of these aforementioned proxies were relations, and past students and teachers.

 Not being directly contacted and simply keeping an eye open for it was the usual. An email via aforementioned proxy was standard enough. A phonecall was…not uncommon, but it required more hoops to jump through to reach (one of) the household’s actual lines, and you had to really _look_ for it to find the right one, or be informed specifically which one to use.

 A call directly to D’s personal cell?

 Not just another ballgame, but a whole ‘nother ballpark in another _state._

 Or. Country, in this case.

 One mobile reunion with a past student of D’s and one fairly lengthy phonecall later, and here they all were a week of their lives poorer with two rented vans stuffed with everything half a dozen road-tripping hunters could need short of the kitchen sink and fucking dynamite. (And both D and Grey had checked. Yes, we know C-4 is a stable explosive, Jake. No, we are not taking any of it with us, Jake.)

 Passports were dug out of filing cabinets and safeboxes (or, in Gale’s case, procured after three hasty days of scrambling back and forth between the DMV and the post office and the house so Hal could…’expedite’ the process in time), weapons were chosen from the house’s armoury, tech was wrapped in various weather-appropriate clothing and shoved into whatever space remained in bulging duffle bags

 and Roxy had graciously made them bacon and egg sandwiches for the heinously early start to their day-and-a-half drive to

 fucking

 Canada.

 “Thought you said whoever told you about this, you know, _told_ you about this,” Dirk hummed.

 D nodded a bit, thoughtful. “He did, but he also said there were a lot of moving parts to this one.”

From the back John mutters something along the lines of ‘I’ll say there is..’ “And he and his local contacts are having a hard time wrangling deets from the actual police.”

 A blue road sign passes the van, the first indication that there was anything at all substantial in the direction they were headed with the white lettering stating *Mailstrom Township Line:20 km*. “Whatever happened, whatever did it, he says it’s either gone and we have to figure out where it went, or-”

 “-We figure out how and where it - or they - are hiding,” Hal finishes for him. “There have been no other incidents since Mr. Cervae’s death and-or disappearance a week and a half ago, so.” Hope for the former, expect the ladder. Practically a hunter’s motto.

 “Since when did we become a private detective agency?” Karkat grumbles. Though it seems fairly mild for the moment, helped with headphones and generally tuning the world out, he’s not happy when Dave’s not happy.

 His head is resting on Dave’s shoulder and had been there since sometime a few hours ago. D had offered for Dave’s sake to stop for a bit, take a stretch, but both the demon and human had stated it was better if they just finished the last leg of the journey.

 “Since Jake starts pulling some weird shit from the decks when looking into this before we left,” Dirk answers.

 John nods along, ticking off on his fingers. “The Emperor reversed, Strength, uh, The Hermit,” He pauses, then shakes his head. “I dunno, a lot of other stuff he was on about, you can ask him when we get to town.”

 “Which should be fairly soon,” D intones, glancing down at the little blue dot on the GPS clipped to the dashboard. It had been a gift...technically...from Dirk for a birthday. The crack in the screen for the little machine’s audacity of existing in the shikigami’s mere presence had been from Hal. Also a gift? (Is it a gift if the intent was less selflessness then it was ‘piss-off-your-brother-who-you-know-is-more-accurate-then-any-tracking-system’ ness?) But it worked nonetheless and the little crisscrossing lines across the virtual map showed a convergence approaching not long now.  

 Behind them, a twin of the vehicle the team was riding in trundled along behind, Grey at the wheel and Jake his copilot. That one had the majority of the gear stashed in it - everything aside from first aid kits, a change of clothing, jumper cables, barfbags and lunchmoney.

 There had actually been some late-night debate on that front. Grey certainly came with them more often than not on hunts when D was a leading member, and this more than qualified for his presence.

 There was the issue with the other Striders, however. Davepeta and Davesprite, for all they looked like middling teens and as much as it wasn’t their fault, couldn’t be safely... _unguarded_ , is the word D had used. _He wasn’t thinking of the sound machete blades on hollow bones forces from a young throat. He wasn’t thinking of that black, silent week that lasted longer than a lifetime…_ Anyone overage was leaving the house for the case, a necessity by way of combined powers and expertise. Grey had suggested Gale, but they refused themself. If they were going to better learn to be a part of the team and live with their powers, then excursions like this were needed.

 In the end, half the Lalonde troupe agreed to look after the home and menagerie of shenanigans that made up the third generation of hunters it housed. The kids needed the time with the other half of their family anyway, D figured, and while he shuddered to think about what it might mean for his personal sense of peace, he was sure the girls would be leaving the kids with more than a couple new and... _interesting_ tricks up their sleeves after the team got home.

 “This will certainly be interesting,” John comments, fidgeting about as the promise of finally getting the proverbial show on the road draws nearer.

 “‘May you live in interesting times’ used to be a curse for a reason, numbnuts,” Karkat comments dryly.

 No one disputed that either.


End file.
